Tag: rancheros

RancherOS v1.1.0 is now available! It includes a number of key enhancements such as: VMWare ESXi support; improved OS level logging, including boot-time logs; remote Syslog logging; and built in Logrotate and Cron services. Syslinux support has improved with the addition of a boot menu, allowing you to select debug, autologin, and recovery consoles. Read more

containerd is an industry-standard core container runtime that was initially released by Docker Inc. in December 2015 and contributed to CNCF in March 2017. We’ve received a number of questions about the project, so I thought I would provide you my perspective as well as some preliminary thoughts on how how Rancher Labs will leverage it.

Docker, Kubernetes, and containerd

The containerd project represents an important step in the evolution of the Docker platform. In the beginning, the Docker engine was quite simple. It merely consisted of the minimum support required to run Docker images on a single host. Over the last few years, however, the Docker Engine has evolved significantly. The Docker engine now includes sophisticated support for cluster management, multi-host networking, and scheduling. Today, Docker is actually closer to a platform like Kubernetes, even though Kubernetes was created to manage Docker. Read more

This week, the Moby Project was introduced with the idea of componentizing Docker into a series of assemblies. At DockerCon, a neat demo was done using the moby tool to assemble various components into customized Linux operating system images. While very cool, this seemed to have confused people – we’d like to provide some more background and explanation about the Moby Project and how it affects Rancher, RancherOS, and our users.

Some background on the Moby Project

The transition to the Moby Project actually started a couple of months ago, with a discussion among the Docker Project maintainers, about the dual nature of Docker as both a product and a project. This dual nature served Docker (the project and the company) well in the beginning, but at the end of the day, Docker, Inc. must make hard decisions about what their product should and will be. As a group of maintainers, we agreed that the product and project should be split. Read more

Cupertino, Calif. – April 12, 2017 – Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, today announced the general availability of RancherOS, a simplified Linux distribution built from containers, for containers. RancherOS eliminates any unnecessary libraries and services, resulting in a footprint three times smaller than that of other container operating systems. The simplified container environment reduces container boot time, increases efficiency and improves security by reducing the number of components that can be exploited.

“At BRCloud Services, we strive to deliver the best solutions to address our customers’ needs,” said Helvio Lima, CEO at BRCloud Services. “RancherOS epitomizes what modern infrastructure should look like. We’re thrilled to integrate the container operating system into our portfolio.”

RancherOS makes it simple to run containers at scale in development, test and production. By containerizing system services and leveraging Docker for management, the operating system provides an incredibly reliable and simple to manage container-ready environment. System services are defined by Docker Compose and automatically configured using cloud-init, reducing administrative burden. Unneeded libraries and services are eliminated, significantly reducing the OS footprint and minimizing the hassle of updating, patching and maintaining a container host operating system. Containers running on RancherOS boot in seconds, making the operating system ideal for running microservices or auto-scaling. Teams can use the Rancher container management platform to easily manage RancherOS at large scale in production.Read more

RancherOS v0.8.0 is now available! This release has taken a bit more time than prior versions, as we’ve been laying more groundwork to allow us to do much faster updates, and to release more often.

Release Highlights

Using the Linux 4.9.9 mainline kernel Using the mainline stable Linux kernel should allow us to give container users access to new features faster – and will mean that RancherOS will have a simpler debug and update path for other software too.

Placing the installer container image in the ISO This change allows users to install RancherOS without internet access, and simplifies automated testability of changes. This adds about 13MB to the ISO, but means that you can do a basic install of RancherOS without pulling an image from the Docker Hub. Read more

We’re excited to announce that RancherOS is now available as a first-class operating system on Packet for all instance types. Packet is a bare metal cloud that combines the speed of physical hardware with the flexibility and ease of use of virtualized infrastructure.

We’ve always been fans of Packet and we make use of it internally quite often. In fact, we’ve recently decided to move our entire CI/CD pipeline over to Packet instances. Prior to native RancherOS support, we’ve been running it internally by booting another operating system and then running a custom installation script.

Even with this overhead we’ve had an excellent experience with Packet. After adding support for automated RAID installs and integrating with Packet’s provisioning system, we were able to create an official installation process and move away from our custom script.

The first version of RancherOS available on Packet is v0.7.0. This release brings many exciting features such as the ability to dynamically choose the Docker engine version via a cloud-config parameter and the ability to easily customize Docker daemon settings. In addition to these new features, RancherOS brings all of its traditional features to the table, such as being an order of magnitude smaller than other operating systems available on Packet.

We’d like to thank Andrew Hodges and the rest of the Packet crew for all of their help throughout this process.